


Sons of Regret

by rivlee



Series: Gone Are All The Days [1]
Category: Band of Brothers, The Pacific - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-17
Updated: 2011-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-20 12:03:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/212584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivlee/pseuds/rivlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The history of the friendship and childhood between Gene Roe and Snafu Shelton. Part of a Modern AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sons of Regret

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeated. First posted Nov. 7, 2010

**Title:** Sons of Regret

 **Rating:** PG-ish. Snafu has a dirty mouth.

 **Characters:** Snafu, Doc Roe, Paw-Paw Roe. Gen.

 **Summary:** A life history with some life changing.

 **Disclaimer:** This is all fiction based off the characters as portrayed in the HBO mini-series. No disrespect is meant.

 **A/N:** Unbeated. Some of this has been posted before. Basically, a quick and dirty history lesson of Roe and Snafu, on the brink of becoming their future selves. Title from The Gaslight Anthem's _Orphans_

 **  
_1997_   
**

When they were little it was them against the world. They were both from families more full of character than money, with too many nights spent listening to screaming matches instead of cicadas. Too many split lips and bruised ribs from school yard battles. Too many days spent digging through donation piles at the Parish church and Goodwill. Too many years lived in too young lives made them so no one else could understand them.

They spoke their own language in downturned lips, scrunched noses, slit eyes and finger taps.  
Their grandmothers and grandfathers spoke with different words and accents. Their parents raised them to speak ‘proper’ and to only ‘talk like your grandma when you at home.’ Their own language fell somewhere in between, taking the words they liked from the books in Miss Alorout’s library and inscribed on the paintings of the church’s walls.

They grew up on sun-baked dusty streets and in backwater bayous. Bare feet slapping on splintered wooden planks and poking at gator and cottonmouth holes. Nights filled with their names called out amidst the sound of the swamp, the shout of “Merl-Francis and Gene-Baptiste” echoing among the frogs and the limbs of the bald cypress trees. Doing their damned best to test all the limits of the immortality of youth.

Their youth meant summers of tan skin, mosquito bites, and joining the family out on the swap. Fall brought the worst of hurricane season, a time full of fear and tense faces, listening to the radio and tv. Winters of sneaking pralines off the cooling racks and wondering about the snow they always saw in the movies. Spring was the best and busiest of all, as the crawfish turned out in droves and everyone was catching and boiling. No one went hungry in the Spring.

They’d lay on the decks, the roads, the bottom of the boats, the porches, promising themselves they’d get each other out of here as soon as they were able. They’d run, never look back, and never leave the other behind.

As they grew-up, bony shoulders and narrow faces forming them into something like young men, the world started pushing them down different dirt roads. Gene-Baptiste buried himself in books on human anatomy and the various philosophies and mythologies of healers. He was full of fervent hope and prayers that any sort of opportunity out of the bayou came with an academic scholarship and a university salvation. Merl-Francis sharpened his tongue and temper, letting black eyes and bleeding knuckles tell his tales. He knew his only way out would come with a pack over his back and a US Military issued weapon on his arm. Swamp folk didn’t really have other means to getting out and breaking the cycles, traditions and curses. Sure, some Cajuns got rich off black gold but that was no one amongst their folk.

Gene-Baptiste and Merl-Francis still had each other, still knew it was them against everyone else and that they’d get out of here somehow, even if it meant burning all decks and bridges, under the grumbling and glaring disapproval of their families. One day they’d leave it all behind. Shed every last twitch of the eye, quirk of the lip, and thick tongued words that spoke better than any birth certificate as to where they came from.

 ************

He read once, in some old schoolbook with a cracked and peeling cover, that the world ends with a whimper not a bang, but for Merriell Shelton it ended with two envelopes. They arrived on the same day, manila harbingers of doom blighting a perfectly good Spring afternoon. Merriell’s was small, designating his time and place for a Military Entrance Processing Station appointment. Gene’s was huge, bearing the familiar symbol of the Louisiana State University Tigers. One packet was months in the waiting, the other two weeks at best.

He stared at the envelopes just lying there all innocent-like on Paw-Paw Roe’s kitchen table. Gene had already been accepted to some colleges, but LSU was the big one. It could be a life changer. Merriell’s life was already changed. His recruiter practically pissed himself when he came to sign up.

He wasn’t ready for college, so he’d enlisted in the Marines. He hadn’t just made the decision over night. It was a long time in coming, in debating costs over college and possible job options. Anything to get out of this backwater. In knowing that Merriell had no clue what he wanted to do with his life, but he sure as shit didn’t want to work on an oil rig, hunt gators for all of September, or compete with all the other fishermen in the bayous. Nobody was exactly thrilled over his decision, but the family had a long line of military service going back to World War II and right now it just seemed to fit.

Like Gene-Baptiste said, there were worst things he could’ve picked for his life.

Gene was going to be a doctor though, come hell or high water. Some people were just meant to be healers, and Gene was one of them. He had the soft touch and the human compassion needed. Gene was eye of the hurricane calm, he could get angry, he could get mean, but when the shit hit he was steady. Always had been that way, the two of them. Slow burning summers, his mama called them. Slow burning summers going down to the wick; the dog days just waiting to bite.

“Merl-Francis, those envelopes ain’t going to bite you. Stop looking at them like it’s the tax man come calling,” Paw-Paw Roe said. He swatted Merriell on the head. “Future’s already decided, boy. What those pieces of paper said already been done. Can’t worry over what’s finished.”

“Gene-Baptiste still got a choice to make,” Merriell said. New Orleans or Baton Rouge. They all wanted Baton Rouge.

“No he don’t,” Paw-Paw Roe insisted. “If LSU said yes, he’s going. And by the looks of it, it’s LSU.”

“He’s already got half of a biology degree to back him up,” Merriell agreed.

Gene was smarter than anyone ought to be, working all days and hours to get going somewhere. He proved all their cultured big-city teachers wrong and pissed them off by daring to be smarter than any of the kids from Louisiana gentry. Pissed them off even more that Gene-Baptiste didn’t show it. They mixed up the class rankings just so some dirty Cajun couldn’t be Valedictorian. Gene didn’t give a flying fuck. Told Merriell over and over again when he was about to start some shit, that high school class ranking didn’t bother him when he was entering college as a Junior. It was the quiet sort of _fuck you all_ Gene-Baptiste excelled at.

Paw-Paw shook his head. “Smart boy that he is, Gene just don’t like to wait. I don’t know why he rushes such things. It’s like he trying to meet some deadline. Unlike you, Merl-Francis. Even if there was a fire under your ass you’d take your time moving.”

“I move on my own time at my own pace,” Merriell drawled.

“Child, I don’t even think the Marines are going to beat that attitude out of you.” He patted Merriell’s hair down. “At least I hope not. Spirit’s like you don’t go broke, Merriell, they just go crazy.”

“And spirits like Gene?” he asked.

Paw-Paw Roe went quiet for a while. He stared out over the bayou, let the warm breeze take him away. He was _the_ Cajun of the Roe family, even if his granddad was the one who changed the family name from Roux to Roe. Paw-Paw Roe was the elder of their community, still spoke French like it was his native tongue, still kept to the traditions. He was the old soul, the wise man among all the cooyon kids. Paw-Paw had grown whiter since Grandma died, but he was still here, still teaching them, still watching out. Their regular own sentry.

He laid a hand on Merriell’s shoulder and said, “They bend, they twist, they fracture, they fight. They get lost in the darkness, but they don’t break either.” His smile was sad, knowing. “Merriell, the next four years, they going be tough for you. They going be hell, but if you survive them, and you better ‘cause I didn’t spend all these years raising you just to have some cooyon Marine officer get you killed, they going make you into something more. Not better, just more. They going change you, they going change Gene. Your hearts, they ain’t going change and you two will always be my grandbabies.” He patted Merriell on the shoulder again. “So stop being such a pussy and open the envelopes. I got money on this.”

Merriell laughed out loud, sharp and happy. This was the house he really grew up in. His name was carved on the wooden planks of the dock. His pet gators languished in the back yard. He’d studied for the SAT’s while Gene picked splinters out of his foot on the front porch. He learned to gamble right at this kitchen table. He drank his first beer under the watchful eyes of Grandma on the living room floor. He smoked his first cigarette, stolen from Gene’s dad, perched on the toilet upstairs. He cleaned his first gun out on the steps of the backdoor. He caught his first possum under the shed and also let go his first catch when he found out it was a mother and her babies. Beatrice and her family had been living in the shed ever since. No matter what else happened in life, this was still going to be his home.

The heat seeped in through the walls, the calls of pelicans and the sound of the cicadas filled the bayou. Lucille and Lionel were snapping their jaws in the back, starting to demand dinner like the ungrateful rescued gators they were. Soon Beatrice and her babies would start clawing through the trash for dinner. He wasn’t going to have many more nights like this.

“Fuck it,” Merriell said and ripped open the envelopes. “Laissez les bons temps rouler.”


End file.
